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Trio of 1817 Bibles found in the Port Hardy Museum, curator wants to locate owner

Contact the musem at 250 949-8143 if you think these are your family’s bibles and want them returned
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The three 1817 Bibles at the Port Hardy Museum. (Tyson Whitney - North Island Gazette)

It’s a real mystery, one that stretches all the way back to the 1990s.

Three Bibles dated 1817 were found in a box in the archives at the Port Hardy Museum, and Curator Jane Hutton is looking to return them to their rightful owner(s).

Hutton said she was rooting around in the archives the other day, reorganizing and looking for items to put on display in exhibits, when she came across three bibles in a box labelled ‘Lacy donation,’ and she didn’t know if this was the original box they were donated in.

The previous curator who worked at the Port Hardy Museum had put on a temporary exhibit of Bibles sometime in the 1990s, “and I guess a few of them just didn’t go back to their original owner,” said Hutton, who added she thinks these three Bibles “kind of go together somehow, there’s a name inside one of them, but I don’t know who that person is, what family they are from, or really anything about them.”

Hutton suspects they were definitely donated by a local family in the community. The inscription in one of the Bible’s reads “Catherine Amelia Heard, from her father, who died November 19, 1884.”

She noted she doesn’t think the Bibles are worth much at all. “They most likely just hold sentimental value, and that’s why I want to get them back to the family.”

“There’s no paperwork with them, if they had been donated to the museum there would be some paperwork, but I haven’t been able to find anything.”

Contact the musem at 250-949-8143 if you think these are your family’s Bibles and would like them returned.


@NIGazette
editor@northislandgazette.com

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The inscription reads “Catherine Amilia Heard, from her father, who died November 19, 1884.” (Tyson Whitney - North Island Gazette)


Tyson Whitney

About the Author: Tyson Whitney

I have been working in the community newspaper business for nearly a decade, all of those years with Black Press Media.
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